Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

by Maureen Corrigan

  In that memoir, Marie proudly announces to her readers that for Mother’s Day one year, “the family gave me a Smith and Wesson 22.” 20 Huh? Marie became interested in target shooting when her son-in-law tried to teach the sport to Karen, whose ears turned out to be too sensitive to stand the sound of the shots. Target shooting becomes a prime activity when Marie is confined to bed rest during her much-longed-for pregnancy with daughter Kristen, toward the end of the book. During those weeks in bed, Marie says, she meditated and read detective stories, as well as lots of books by now moldy Catholic authors like Cardinal Newman, Ronald Knox, and Wilfred Sheed. She also shoots at some suggestive targets. Jimmy buys his wife an air pistol and sets up a target right “under the altar on my mantel. . . . On good days I would fire for several hours. ” 21 Some pages later, Marie recalls how she and Jimmy, restless for activity one night, “dry fire” her pistol at her bookcase.

  Under the altar? And the bookcase? The very one that contains those volumes of canonical Catholic literature? If the Karen books were works of fiction rather than memoirs (and I know that current literary theory tells us there’s little real difference between the genres), I’d feel freer to say that Marie was taking aim at the Church—particularly its repressive, restrictive attitudes toward women—attitudes that have turned the bedridden Marie into a mother/martyr who’s now become more immobile than her handicapped daughter. Given the avowed depth and sincerity of her faith, however, I think it’s enough to marvel at Marie’s aggressive choice of a hobby and how it helps her “pop off ” in an acceptable way. I don’t think Marie’s choice of targets is her covert way of saying “Non serviam ”; the Karen books themselves trumpet that message, loud and clear.

  “Non serviam” not to God, or to Marie’s particular vocation as a wife and mother, but to the overarching Catholic mind-set of “just accept.” The Karen books are defiant because, even while they traditionally affirm that Karen’s disability is a mark of her divine election, they also chronicle the Killileas’ monumental effort to amend this heavenly gift. Like those of us Catholic schoolkids who blasphemously prayed that the finger of God would skip over us and tap our neighbor’s shoulder to summon him or her to be a priest or a nun, the Killileas—and Marie, above all—resist what conventional Catholic wisdom told them was God’s plan for their daughter. Just before setting out alone on that life-altering visit to Dr. B in Karen, Marie confides to her readers: “I didn’t want anyone to know about this trip since, with the exception of our mothers, there was a pretty general opinion that we had carried this searching business a bit too far. Certainly beyond the realm of good sense. ‘You must learn to accept and stop fighting this thing,’ was the usual advice. ”22

  Of course it would have been. Meekness, humility, and above all, acceptance are still cardinal Catholic virtues. But the cry of rebellion shrieks through the Karen books as the fighting Killileas ceaselessly prevail, together and individually, against what seems to be foreordained. Marie delights in her clan’s give-’em-hell spirit and especially revels in her own grit and shanty-Irish gift for back talk. So, how did two such sassy, seditious, even protofeminist memoirs wind up on the required-reading list for generations of Catholic schoolkids? Once again, that memory of upright parishioners ostentatiously kneeling at Sunday Mass comes to mind. Marie kneels so ramrod straight all throughout her memoirs, it’s easy to miss the glint in her eye.

  I loved the Karen books when I was a kid, and I still love them today. I hope, while talking about them, I haven’t sounded condescending. That’s a danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living: you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you’re “decoding.” If that literary material is Catholic, there’s an even greater temptation to patronize it. In the academy these days, any “exotic” religion (that includes Judaism) is talked about in respectful-of-difference tones, but the gibes fly fast and loose whenever Catholicism is mentioned. Catholicism is different enough to be vaguely irritating but not so different as to evoke serious anthropological respect.

  When I’ve laughed at aspects of the Karen books here, I’ve felt as though I’m sharing an inside joke. The assumptions and codes of behavior of the Killileas’ pre–Vatican II Catholic world are utterly familiar to me. I may not live in that world anymore, but then, I couldn’t; it no longer exists. Almost everyone who rates a mention in the Karen books is Catholic. In With Love from Karen, even her doctors at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia kindly advise the visiting Killileas on the local Mass schedule. That self-confident, cohesive Catholic community is the one I lovingly remember from childhood. It was broken up, undoubtedly for the better, by the changes wrought by Pope John XXIII, as well as by feminism, the civil rights movement, and the other social revolutions of the 1960s, and also by an increasingly profane and powerful mass culture, by urban migration, and by dozens of other factors that I’m not taking into account.

  Nevertheless, I miss that world from the safe distance of memory. I wonder about the Killileas’ lives beyond the Karen books. How did they ride out the upheavals of the coming decades? Did Gloria and her divorced beau, Russ, like Newland Archer pining for Madame Olenska in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, later regret all those years of their youth spent petitioning Rome for an annulment of Russ’s first marriage when, these days, hardly anyone would care and they could probably find some progressive priest willing to marry them out on a beach somewhere without the papal seal of approval? What of that devout young man named Joe who was always hanging around the house in With Love from Karen? He liked fashion and was always available to escort daughter Marie to dances but never seemed romantically interested in her or any other girl. Surely he must have been in the closet, maybe even to himself. Did he come out? Leave the Church? Join the priesthood and/or sleep with men (or, God forbid, altar boys)? Or repress, repress, repress? And what about Karen? In the 1983 preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of With Love from Karen, Marie tells readers that Karen had become a secretary to “one of the busiest priests in the world”23 and sat on the board of the Cardinal Hayes Home for Children in the Bronx. Is she still there?

  I could satisfy some of my curiosity via the Internet, but I won’t. Just as I often wonder, but don’t really want to know, about the adult lives of my classmates from St. Raphael’s who gradually disappeared from the old neighborhood after eighth-grade graduation. The Karen books, as they stand, mean too much to me as literary traces of the lost culture of my own childhood. I don’t want their stories updated. Better to reread and enjoy them in their 1950s “uncolorized” version. Just as I suspect it’s better for me to remember my classmates as it felt to be standing with them on that long-ago autumn day, all of us in our prelapsarian states, excitedly waiting for the pope.

  Traditional female secular martyrs were shrouded in a double bind of ladylike meekness and Catholic humility—a double bind that Houdiniesqe narrators like Marie Killilea managed to elude as she proudly, yet piously, recounted the spiritual extreme adventures that constitute the Karen books. For male secular martyrs, there was more leeway allowed in terms of boasting of their trials in prose. After all, men in the Church were supposed to show off more. While the nuns of my childhood were always swathed in black from head to toe, the parish priests slipped out of their black suits on Sunday and donned beautiful vestments whose bright colors, keyed to the liturgical calendar, would have pleased a peacock. A glance at the work of one of the most widely read secular male martyrs of the 1950s and ’60s illustrates how masochism and machismo went hand in hand in God’s service.

  “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” Before the changes of Vatican II, that’s what we Catholics used to chant midway through the Mass as we beat our fists against our hearts. Like those ostentatious kneeling displays at Sunday Mass, energetic breast-beatings were once an even more explicit way for parishioners to signal simultaneously their piety and their preeminence. “Through my fault—thump, through
my fault—thump—through my most grievous fault— thump.” That’s the sound I hear when I think of Dr. Tom Dooley and his three enormously popular memoirs, Deliver Us from Evil (1956), The Edge of Tomorrow (1958), and The Night They Burned the Mountain (1960).

  Dooley was an Irish American Catholic Navy doctor who set up field hospitals in Vietnam and Laos during the 1950s. He was also a central figure in the formation of MEDICO, a humanitarian aid organization that was later folded into CARE. After a few brief and intensely frenetic years spent establishing clinics and tending to the sick and the victims of war in Southeast Asia, Dooley died young, at age thirty-four, from malignant melanoma. In my grammar-school mind, Dooley was conflated with the youngest of our three parish priests, Father O’Hagan, who was also Irish, handsome, and energetic—what we Catholic girls would learn to call in high school “a real Father What-a-Waste.” The good-looking Dooley wasn’t a priest, but he seemed to be fiercely celibate, devoting all of his time to tending the sick, accompanied only by the young American, Laotian, and Vietnamese men he trained as aides. A jaded contemporary reader will suspect that something more than bandage rolling might have been going on between Dooley and “his boys.” Sure enough, according to a well-received 1997 biography of Dooley by James T. Fisher called Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961,24 Dooley was “out” to homosexual circles in the United States and Southeast Asia. Shortly after his bestseller Deliver Us from Evil was published, the Navy, acting on information gleaned from months of investigation of Dooley’s private life, quietly booted him out with a dishonorable discharge. Undaunted, Dooley fabricated a cover story that he resigned from the Navy in order to carry out his maverick humanitarian work without the interference of military bureaucracy.

  Nor are those the most dramatic of the revelations concerning Dooley. According to Fisher, the CIA was onto Dooley’s potential as a propaganda machine very early. The required “situation reports” Dooley filed as a medical officer in Vietnam were, in contrast to the cut-and-dried language of his colleagues, both melodramatic and fervently patriotic. The top brass suggested that Dooley shape his reports into a book that would help garner public support for Operation Passage to Freedom— the moving of hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese refugees to the South, ostensibly to protect them from the Communists and, coincidentally, to create a constituency for the newly reinstalled South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. Ngo was a Catholic, and so were many of the refugees fleeing North Vietnam. Later, in Laos, Dooley would perform an even more hands-on mission for the CIA, smuggling weapons into the country along with his pharmaceutical supplies and surgical gear.

  But that’s not all Dooley was. Even in Fisher’s revisionist biography, Dooley registers as a very religious young man and a hardworking doctor who really did heal people and save lives. If only human identity weren’t so messy, we could crack the riddle of moral enigmas like Dooley as easily and as glibly as I sometimes “solve” Gatsby or Madame Bovary in class for my students.

  In light of Fisher’s later revelations, this is going to sound self-congratulatory, but it’s nonetheless true that, while I admired the Dooley I met in the memoirs we students were required to read, I didn’t feel comfortable with him—certainly not the way I felt with Marie Killilea and her family. Had I known about Jonathan Edwards when I was at St. Raphael’s, I think I would have compared Dooley to the great Puritan sermon writer. In print, both men have an icy, disdainful quality about them that alternates with a wrathful temper. In a 1961 memorial volume entitled Before I Sleep . . . The Last Days of Dr. Tom Dooley, many of Dooley’s friends reluctantly acknowledge his overbearing arrogance that rubbed lots of people the wrong way. As holy men go, Dooley is more in the Saint Paul or Archangel Michael mode, rather than that of the kindly Saint Francis. He demonstrates a charming, self-deprecating sense of humor throughout the memoirs, but he never lets his readers forget that these lighter moments are but short respites from his Important Work.

  Throughout the late 1950s into the 1960s, every self-respecting Catholic read Dooley’s books or their excerpts in Reader’s Digest; like the Killileas, Dooley was a secular saint, a practicing Catholic who suffered in silence an extreme adventure of the body and spirit. The fact that Dooley’s torment took place in the public and traditionally masculine extreme-adventure arena of war, rather than in the private and feminine domain of the home, like the Killileas’ saga did, makes Dooley sound tougher, more swaggering. But the crucial difference between Dooley and the Killileas was that he chose to climb up on his cross; the Killileas had martyrdom thrust upon them. His martyrly volunteerism accounts, I think, for the condescending tone he often adopts toward us, his readers. The very fact that we’re reading his books, rather than living his life, confirms that that’s what we are—passive readers, not “doers” like Dooley.

  If Dooley could forsake all the luxuries of his American life and go off to Southeast Asia where torments of biblical proportion (war, fire, disease, starvation) awaited him, how could we, the chairbound, dare complain about anything—least of all Dooley’s disdain for us? For me, reading Dooley the second time around was like making a dimly remembered act of penance. As the pages turned, I felt worse and worse about my own timid sense of faith, my ever-present longing to curl up with a good book. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. But Dooley was a doctor, not a priest; maybe that’s why he never administers absolution to his readers.

  Dooley’s final memoir, The Night They Burned the Mountain, is the one I remembered best from childhood. That’s not surprising, because it’s the most flagrant in its Catholic commingling of self-renunciation and self-display. In that book, Dooley describes his discovery of the malignant melanoma that would speedily claim his life. The memoir opens in August 1959 just as Dooley has been mysteriously summoned back to the United States from Laos because, as we later learn, his medical superiors have just done a biopsy of a tumor and diagnosed his cancer. Dooley knows something’s up, but he doesn’t know what. On his trip home, he has dinner with an informed medical friend who takes pity on Dooley in his anxious state and breaks the bad news to him. Here’s Dooley’s response: “I had no reaction. . . . I felt nothing. . . . It seemed for a moment that all was quiet.”25

  This lack of affect is understandable: shock renders lots of people numb. What’s weird, however, is that this scene occurs toward the end of Chapter 1 and is followed by more than a hundred pages where Dooley ostentatiously changes the subject to discuss the hospital work he’s left behind in Laos. The narrative structure of The Night They Burned the Mountain dramatizes Dooley’s superhuman act of self-silencing. We readers plow through the central chapters of his memoir, waiting for Dooley to break down and unburden himself, but he keeps his chin up and his lips sealed—suffering in silence. Interestingly, he’s not so silent about other topics that, spiritually speaking, are kind of dodgy. Dooley often sounds like he’s been reading too much Nietzsche (or, at least, Emily Dickinson) as he exults in overheated language about his solitary sense of election. For instance, back in Laos, Dooley observes that he and his two young male medics “had that strange kind of loneliness that men have who find themselves swinging out beyond the boundaries of normal existence. . . . We felt as though we were standing on the mountain peak and had, just for a quick moment, a tremendous view of the world.”26 Lest those two medics share too easily in Dooley’s mystical apartness, he quickly adds: “The loneliness I knew was different from the loneliness of my boys.”

  Dooley’s outsized sense of self-importance was grounded in the reality that, for months at a time, he was the only Western doctor in the surrounding area, literally charged with the care and salvation of thousands. Given that the only fellow westerners he could turn to for company were his subordinates and that many of his day-to-day interactions were with Cambodian and Laotian refugees, it’s understandable that Dooley would fall prey to the Heart of Darkness syndrome. His Irish temper also kept the locals at bay and the folks back home cowering. In
a letter to his mother included in The Night They Burned the Mountain, he rages about the deluge of irritating fan mail he receives from the States: “Don’t people in America know I’ve got my own problems from day to day? . . . I must battle . . . and work out the problems of war, death and chaos. People write and ask me to write another book and tell me how I must find words. Don’t they realize I have other things to do now.”27

  Marie Killilea also complained about the torrents of mail she received from her readers, but her tone was good-naturedly guilty; she might have been complaining about piles of dishes left undone. (And she was probably flattered by all that fan mail.) Like other Great Men throughout the ages, however, Dooley, down deep, takes himself ultra-seriously, which is another reason he’s not easy to read. He exudes an Olympian disdain for his badgering readers: it’s they who must please him, not the other way around.

  The final framing chapter of The Night They Burned the Mountain returns Dooley to the United States, where he’s about to undergo surgery. In an extraordinary scene—one that quintessentially illustrates how resourceful saints can be when it comes to showcasing their suffering—Dooley permits his operation to be filmed for a television documentary on cancer, The Biography of a Cancer, the brainchild of Fred Friendly. When it aired on April 21, 1960, on CBS, the program was watched by millions. While Dooley was anesthetized, motionless, and mum, draped in surgical gowns “in the middle of [a] huge [operating] amphitheatre, ”28 the God’s-eye-view TV cameras watched every detail of his ordeal. I can think of no other scene in the entire canon of Catholic secular-saint stories that so brazenly demonstrates that genre’s characteristic conflict between the desire for self-display and self-abnegation.

  I still admire Dooley in a qualified way and feel sad when I think of him in his splendid solitude—isolated by culture, by sexuality, by his inherent arrogance, and, finally, by his illness. The official ascension of a human being to sainthood entails a slow, sometimes centuries-long bureaucratic process within the Catholic Church, during which witnesses must come forward to attest to miracles the prospective saint, even after death, has managed to perform. Were it not for all the revelations that have come out about him, Dooley would have been a shoo-in. He practically said as much in his own memoirs. If Dooley, somehow, were to ever be canonized, I’d like to see him made the Patron Saint of the Perpetually Incensed—intercessor to those who must work surrounded by their mental and physical inferiors, those who write books destined to be read by readers too unenlightened to understand.